Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

As I waited for the elevator, the only guests in the lobby were a group of Japanese citizens holding red passports, talking to each other as they waited to check in.

I took the elevator up and carded myself into the suite. When I finally put my back against the door, I let my breath go. Elizabeth’s bedroom was closed, the whole suite dead in the middle of the night, waiting for our departure. I got into my pajamas and slid into bed, staring at the empty place on the bedside table where the betta fish tank normally sat, had been for the six weeks we’d lived here, now gone. Elizabeth took care of shipping the betta fish. There had been nine or ten bettas in my life, the fish being one constant in our moving. I’d told Elizabeth I’d outgrown this tradition, but was happy to be told that she wanted to keep on doing it. Where was the betta fish tonight? In his bag of water in a Styrofoam box in the cargo bay of an airliner at fifty thousand feet? I watched the tiny green light on the fire alarm blinking on the ceiling above me, not really knowing if I ever went to sleep or not.

Before dawn, Elizabeth and I unceremoniously walked out the front doors of the Windmere with one carry-on apiece and Elizabeth handling her violin in its black case, no one in the hotel acknowledging our departure, nor caring, and we climbed aboard a shuttle bus and rode to DFW departures where I immediately checked the news headlines on my phone again as if there would be some news of Van Raye. There wasn’t.

Elizabeth had lately begun to think it was useful for business development to backtrack in our journey. If the condemned property was large enough to warrant a demolition party, she wanted to be there. So we were going to fly to Phoenix, see the final moments of the Sun Resort, meet people, and make a quick turnaround to Atlanta by tomorrow morning. That was my life.

We were x-rayed and scanned at the airport, Elizabeth making sure the blue-gloved TSA agents handled her violin properly. Each time I went through security I had to think about my cousin Durbourg who called the world beyond security “the Airport Zone,” a place he claimed was the safest place in the world.

Elizabeth and I took the tram to our concourse and rose on the escalator into the chaos of the intersection, walked together past the retail stores and the food court. When you’ve been up all night, the new day seems like a blurry extension of the last one.

At our gate, I plopped down in a seat and tried not to sigh and tried to look energetic. Elizabeth sat two seats down from me, piled her bag and violin in the seat between us. She knew I had stayed out all night and waited for any sign of weariness so she could pounce.

She put on reading glasses and pulled out her book. Karen Carpenter’s face on the cover, that bewildered look.

“Are you enjoying Karen Carpenter’s life?” I asked.

“It’s a good book. Her brother was a music prodigy. She was a very hard worker.”

“She died from anorexia?”

“Yes. She started dieting at sixteen and that was the beginning of her decline. She started a diet called ‘The Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet.’ This was under doctor’s supervision. Isn’t that amazing? One of the main parts of the diet was drinking eight glasses of water a day. Can you imagine that? This is what doctors believed back then. What are we doing these days, under doctor’s orders , that people in the future will think insane?”

I knew this was a mini lecture, but I relaxed just being in an airport with my mother. Honestly, I loved waiting in airports. We could do nothing but waste time. There was no business, no duties to perform, no people to meet. Whatever she was reading, when we were in the Airport Zone, it seemed interesting. I opened my eyes to listen to her.

As she talked I watched her. She was dressed in a nice pants suit, only her glasses were disturbingly cheap with gaudy, fake stones on the front, dried glue beneath the plastic gems. She didn’t believe in the return value of expensive eyeglasses.

Leaning an elbow on my bag, I began re-inspecting the back of my eyelids as she told me snippets of Karen Carpenter’s life, me trying not to think about Franni, the phone call, someone playing Elvis to harass me, Van Raye telling me we aren’t alone in the universe — everything like a dream. I had gone through all my secure websites and changed the password I’d had forever (“bettafish14”) to a new password, “geneva1000x.” After you change your old password, you feel like you’ve left an old life behind.

I interrupted Elizabeth, “Where’s Randolph been?”

She searched her mind, and I saw her memory catch but she cracked no emotion and played dumb. Did her face really blush? “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

When I was a kid, she would turn into “Randolph” when we got bored waiting in airports or waiting for meetings when no one else was around. When this possession took over her body, she changed her voice to this kind of fay Transylvanian accent and claimed he, this person Randolph, had possessed her, checking our world out. It was so unlike her to do Randolph; I couldn’t even imagine her doing it back then, certainly couldn’t imagine her doing it now, but I wanted some acknowledgment that this had been part of our lives. It was Elizabeth’s magic.

Randolph always acted surprised to find himself in Elizabeth’s body, announcing, “Randolph is here! Randolph, never Randy!” coming to her when we were on the concourse level of terminal 4 at JFK. He would say, “This is one of those ports for aircraft! Which one is this?” It was a good performance. I could barely see hints of Elizabeth’s personality coming through, the dry analysis of things around her, filtered through the mind of someone supposedly not from this world. After quizzing me about Earth, about America and this world, never a word about hotels, Randolph would announce his departure, “Until next time, Number 1.” (He called me, for no known reason, “Number 1.”) When he left, Elizabeth’s face would change back to normal, staring at the familiar airport, and I would say, “Elizabeth?” and she would always respond in her own voice restored, “What? What’s the matter with you?”

There had been a period of time when I’d begged Elizabeth to fess up that she was Randolph, but she never broke or gave the act up, Randolph coming into her body when I least expected. When she was bored with driving the rental car through the desert, she would suddenly announce in the accent, “ What is this I’m doing? ” staring at the steering wheel. “ What is this machine called? ” I remember her being startled once when I asked, “If you die, would Randolph die too?” She simply said, “I’m not going to die.”

I don’t remember when she stopped doing Randolph, but it was a part of my childhood that had been helpful, used, and then put down.

“Come on,” I said to her now in DFW, “Randolph one more time. You know, I want to hear the voice.”

“You’re almost thirty years old,” she said. I could tell she was mulling it over. Randolph never made requested appearances. Had Elizabeth become even more serious over the years, lost the ability to be Randolph?

“Aren’t you over that?” she said.

“No.”

“Anyway, I certainly don’t know what you are talking about,” she said.

I could see a hint of a smile, but she kept reading without that index finger scanning each line in Karen Carpenter’s life.

Finally the counter agent called over the speaker, “Passengers Sandeep and Elizabeth Sanghavi please see an airline representative,” probably thinking we were some married couple. People either thought it was weird or noble that I’d traveled my whole life with my mother. To me, it was just us.